UKIP’s leader in the London Assembly has vowed to fight the city’s Muslim Mayor as he cracks down on free speech, whilst slamming multicultural ideology and warning about the threat from radical Islam.

Peter Whittle (pictured above) stood as the UKIP candidate for Mayor of London in 2016, and along with David Kurten, became the party’s first representatives in the London assembly in 12 years.

He explained how, since entering office, the two men “have spoken out against the danger to freedom of speech which comes with the growing obsession with hate crime”.

Shortly after the Brexit vote, Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan launched a “crackdown” on so-called hate crime, claiming there had been an epidemic of such attacks since the nation voted the leave the European Union.

In his speech at the UKIP conference, Mr. Whittle also raised concerns about the Mayor’s new police “hate crime hub” launched in August, whereby “a dedicated police team” will monitor social media full time for so-called hate crimes and “trolls”.

“Now whatever you think about hate crime, the fact is, increasingly people do not know what they are allowed to say, what they will be prosecuted for and what they will be reported for”, Mr. Whittle claimed.

David Kurten

This June, it was reported that the number of people arrested in London for so-called “online crimes of speech”, mainly made on social media, has shot up dramatically in the past few years.

“We think this is one of the fundamental values of our party – that we have freedom of speech – and we have been putting the case for that in the [London] Assembly”, he added.

Mr. Whittle praised UKIP for bringing issues about culture and immigration into the national debate and added: “We must be the party that speaks up about the threat we face from radical Islamism”.

He said that the most important political issues of our times are cultural, and slammed Western nations for losing faith in their own traditions and fostering a “culture of national self-loathing”.

“And we must be the party that stands not for the divisive, confidence strangling doctrine of multiculturalism, which has cause fragmentation and confusion, but for a country united under the same set of British laws and values”, he said.

Yesterday, UKIP’s immigration spokesman Steve Woolfe condemned the London Mayor for travelling to the US to back Hillary Clinton for president, saying he “is part of the axis of anti-democratic elites who wish to control people”.

Mr. Khan also used his American trip to claim that Republican candidate Donald Trump is “playing into the hands” of the Islamic State.

However, during his election campaign, the Mayor was accused of sympathising with Islamic extremist after it emerged he shared a platform with numerous anti-Semites, defended 9/11 terrorists as a barrister and had a brother-in-law who was a member of banned jihadi group Al-Muhajiroun.

And since taking office, Mr. Khan has appointed an extremism-linked “Integration Deputy Mayor”, as Breitbart Londonrevealed earlier this week.

A petition has been set up against Mr. Khan’s proposed hate crime measures.